Jesus took upon himself the very thing that breaks mankind’s dominion over this world: the curse of sin, which is death. But Jesus did not remain dead. He rose from the grave and was lifted to God’s right hand, where he sits now enthroned and crowned with glory and honor, waiting until the fullness of the kingdom.

Reading Hebrews

According to Hebrews, the pattern of Jesus’s incarnation, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension is the key to understanding an interpretive tension in the Psalms. In Hebrews 2, the author turns from his argument that Jesus is superior to the angels to the fact that Jesus helps humans, not angels. In this context, he says,

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
    or the son of man, that you care for him?
You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
    you have crowned him with glory and honor,
    putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. (Heb. 2:5–8)

The author reads Psalm 8 carefully. He is committed to understanding the psalm as written. The author refuses to let David be imprecise. If David says “everything” is placed in subjection to man, then it must mean everything in creation, no exceptions. And yet, this is not what we see. Since Scripture must be entirely true, the author says, we have a problem. Everything is supposed to be under our control, but it is not. We suffer. Our own bodies revolt against us. We die. We face myriad dangers: natural disaster, disease, accidents, enemies. Everything is very much not in subjection to us.

Not yet, the author says.

By now you know that in some way Jesus is the solution to this interpretive difficulty, but there is a false trail I do not want us to follow. We might be tempted to read “son of man” in Psalm 8 in light of how Jesus refers to himself with this expression in the Gospels. We might conclude that the psalm was never actually about us but about Jesus the whole time. That would resolve the tension, but it would be wrong.

Hebrews does not let us read the psalm this way. Instead the author clarifies the problem: “We do not yet see everything in subjection to him” (Heb. 2:8). In subjection to whom? To man, to the son of man, to the one discussed in Psalm 8. This is precisely the problem. God subjected everything to humanity, but we do not see everything subject to us. God’s word and our world seem to be in conflict. How is Jesus the solution to this dilemma? How does Jesus’s work solve the problem of humanity’s position in the world? Jesus’s work must enable humanity to occupy the role God intended. And this, precisely, is where Hebrews goes: “But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Heb. 2:9).

The author’s argument is compact. Jesus, like mankind in Psalm 8, is crowned with glory and honor.

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